Both the Kings' Men

By Michael Agger

Published: April 25, 2004

A SPECTACLE OF CORRUPTION

By David Liss.

381 pp. New York:

Random House. $24.95.

In his first novel, ''A Conspiracy of Paper,'' David Liss achieved the literary equivalent of turning lead into gold: he parlayed his graduate-student reading into a suspenseful historical fiction about the South Sea Bubble, the financial panic that upended 18th-century London. He also created the memorable character of Benjamin Weaver, who would describe himself as a member of the Hebrew nation, a retired pugilist and a ruffian for hire. Today we might call him a tough Jewish private eye. After a one-book hiatus, in which Liss mired himself in a tangled novel about the origins of the coffee trade, he's returned for another round with Weaver, and it's a pleasure have him back.

In the book's opening pages, Weaver relates how he's gained notoriety upon publishing his memoirs, and now he wishes to set the record straight concerning his involvement in the murder of a man named Walter Yate. That sounds straightforward enough, but Yate is but the merest tip of a conspiracy that entangles Weaver in the thickets of English electoral politics. At first glance, the mating habits of the sea anemone may sound like more promising page-turning material. But it is to Liss's credit that the politics eventually outshines the fisticuffs. He sets the novel during a fascinating time in England's history, specifically 1722, when the first general election of King George's reign is under way. Contesting the seats in Parliament are the Whigs, the party of the rising mercantile class, and the Tories, who favor a strong monarchy and the landed gentry. The rogue faction is the Jacobites, a group of conspirators who despise George as a usurper. (He spoke only German and had German mistresses.) They want to install a Catholic king, James III, on the throne; when gathered in taverns, they wave their hands over their glasses to signal an allegiance to the ''king over the water.''

It's just these bits of historical detail that Liss folds into his narrative with the deft touch of a practiced pickpocket. As Weaver attempts to clear his name after being framed for a murder, and as we follow in his wake, Liss lays out the landscape of political London. He has his hero drinking with the porters down at Wapping, who sing partisan ballads and hire themselves out as intimidating mobs at the polling places. (A voter would state his choice and then be pummeled upon his exit.) Weaver also disguises himself as a wealthy Jamaican planter and infiltrates society parties, where Tories disclose their contempt for Jews, ''stockjobbers'' and atheists. The Jacobites are a bit more discreet about their opinions, congregating in coffeehouses and communicating in code. Weaver seems to become their pawn, as well as the plaything of the press, which exaggerates his exploits for political agendas. Adding to the ''spectacle of corruption'' are the campaign rallies with blood sports like goose-pulling, and the voting clubs that sell their allegiance to the highest bidder.

As the election process suggests, the appeal of 18th-century London is that it was a time and place both more urbane and more crude than our own. The snuffboxes, formal visits and decorous society coexisted with the neighborhood prostitutes, the public hangings and the pure filth. Indeed, Liss displays a somewhat unhealthy hygienic fixation. Weaver cannot walk into a room without taking note of the overflowing chamber pots, or stroll down an alley without stepping upon a decaying dog. Despite this tic, Liss seems remarkably at home in his chosen era. Period detail, after all, can be found in encyclopedias. The harder task is to give the texture of a time, to have the scholarly footing to imagine credibly how a Jewish outsider might have thought, walked and acted in the London of 1722. Weaver may have some thoroughly modern ideas of truth and justice for all, but he also has a sense of place and class that would allow him to slide comfortably into a Dickens novel.

This worldview is present in the faux archaic voice that Liss has invented for Weaver, a winning mix of formal diction and wry understatement. His description of a French landlady is typical: ''She was as short as a child, shaped like an egg, and her ruddy cheeks and poor balance suggested to me that she was a bit overly fond of her drink. None of this would have troubled me had she not demonstrated a horrific urge to converse with me.'' For the most part, the language seamlessly combines the modern and the anachronistic. (Liss even has a neat trick he employs to circumvent cliché -- ''I would cross that bridge, as it is said, when I came to it'' -- that almost works.) Weaver is not a natural wit, but Liss gets a lot of comedy out of the contrast between his character's stilted prose and his frequent head bashing. For a tough guy, he's awfully polite. The closest Weaver ever gets to a ''make my day'' statement is the following: ''If you are to suggest, once again, that I flee, I must tell you that I shall not.''

A common problem with historical fiction is that an author will spend so much time polishing a character that he or she never takes him or her out for a drive. Liss sends Weaver into danger at the drop of a top hat, and he handles these action scenes well. One of the book's best set pieces is a nighttime escape from Newgate prison, involving a truly harrowing moment of claustrophobia. As for affairs of the heart, Liss is a bit more circumspect and a lot less smooth. One of Weaver's vices is his fondness for whoring, but he truly loves his cousin's widow, Miriam, and has asked for her hand in marriage three times. In the first novel, their frowned-upon affair was a key subplot, but now, somewhat implausibly, Miriam has decided to become Mary, a convert to Protestantism and the wife of a leading Tory politician who becomes Weaver's rival. That, as it is said, is called stacking the deck.

In any event, the more important relationship for a literary hero is the best friend. Holmes had his Watson, and Aubrey his Maturin. When Weaver needs to think things over, he relies on Elias Gordon, a surgeon, bon vivant and sometime playwright. At present, Gordon is a rather thinly drawn confidant. The challenge for Liss, if he continues on with Weaver, is to increase the intellectual heft of his stories, and perhaps even mix in some pointless and diverting conversation that doesn't advance his clockwork plots. Good historical novels compel us to turn the pages, breathing in facts that we otherwise might not even approach. Great historical novels have eddies, asides and leftover bits of life. They can never really recreate an era, but they somehow become a universe of their own.